This year’s Westminster Conference on Science and Faith, held at Covenant Fellowship Church in Glen Mills, Pennsylvania, was one of the best I’ve attended. The theme was The Miracle of Man, and the host, John West, pointed to man’s uniqueness among life on earth and credited God as the designer who made man in his mage. This is profound because of what it implies about who we are. But it’s in conflict with claims made by evolutionists, who insist humans aren’t made in the image of God, nor are we special or unique. However, the speakers made a successful case that humans- according to science and faith- are indeed special.

This post focuses on Casey Luskin’s presentation on mankind’s unique design. His evidence consists of the fossil record, genetics, and psychology.

Evolutionists have had to acknowledge, not only is the fossil record highly fragmented, but there’s much disagreement in the field. According to evolutionist Henry Gee, for example, the “fossil evidence of human evolutionary history is fragmentary and open to various interpretations.”

This means, even if humans didn’t descend from an ape-like ancestor, evolutionists will interpret the evidence as if they did. So we observe bias injected into science. The evidence is skewed. And this bias may sway people into believing evolution when no evolution took place. Sadly, many are unaware of alternative explanations, leading them to wrongly believe science has proven evolution.  

The truth is, non-evolutionary interpretations, such as God creating humans uniquely in his image, is not only a valid interpretation, but the best interpretation. In fact, according to some scientists, modern humans, Neanderthals and Homo erectus all belong to the same species, just as creationists have claimed all along. So it’s good to see science catching up to faith.

Luskin ripped the idea that the ape-like Australopithecus is related to humans. He demonstrated that there is no fossil evidence to support this claim. And the scientific literature concurs. According to the Journal of Molecular Biology and Evolution, “We, like many others, interpret the anatomical evidence to show that early H. sapiens was significantly and dramatically different from earlier and [near] contemporary australopithecines in virtually every element of its skeleton and every remnant of its behavior. Its appearance reflects a real acceleration of evolutionary change from the more slowly changing pace of australopithecine evolution.”

These “dramatic” differences are evidence that humans are NOT related. And the term “acceleration” poses a red flag; the journal continues: “no gradual series of changes in earlier australopithecine populations clearly leads to the new species, and no australopithecine species is obviously transitional.”

And according to Harvard Paleoanthropologists, “Of the various transitions that occurred during human evolution the transition from Australopithecus to homo was undoubtedly one of the most critical in its magnitude and consequences… many details of this transition are obscure because of the paucity of the fossil and archaeological records.” As if that’s not bad enough, they go on to say, “Although we lack many details about exactly how, when and where this transition occurred from Australopithecus to homo, we have sufficient data from before and after the transition to make some inferences about the overall nature of key changes that did occur.”

Simply amazing! They admit there’s no evidence of any transition, but then explain how to get around that obstacle- by blindly assuming evolution. Voila!

Then there’s evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr who said early homo fossils are “separated from Australopithecus by a large, unbridged gap. How can we explain this seeming saltation? Not having any fossils that can serve as missing links, we have to fall back on the time honored Method of historical science, the construction of a historical narrative.”

Great quote. Many evolutionists won’t admit there’s such thing as historical science because doing so implies that science isn’t objective, but subjective. You see, history isn’t subject to the scientific method the same way operational science is. For instance, we can directly observe modern apes in their environment, but we can’t observe a mythical ape-like creature evolving into a modern human. So its this ability to create a “historical narrative” that allows evolutionists to promote evolution.

Luskin then tackled the evolutionary claim that chimps and humans are 98.8 percent genetically similar. Evolutionists, by pushing this false claim, diminish the uniqueness of humans. However, the peer review journal Science has called this the “Myth of 1%” because it’s not true. The actual difference, depending upon the source, is between 84- 96 percent, and that’s enough to soundly reject evolution.

But that raises a bigger problem for evolution: there’s not enough time for all those differences in the human genome to evolve. Changing just 4 percent of our DNA amounts to about 120 million nucleotides, which is an insurmountable obstacle in the 6 million years evolutionists assume we last shared a common ancestor with chimps.

Another peer review in the journal Genetics admitted that obtaining two simultaneous mutations “is very unlikely to occur on a reasonable timescale.” Indeed. By their own calculations it would take more than 100 million years!

On the other hand, any similarities between chimps and humans can be explained by a common designer- namely God. If God created all kinds of organisms to fill various environments, it makes perfect sense to use similar designs, just as human engineers and programmers do when building cars or programming computers. Even Francis Collins, an opponent of ID, agrees that similarity does not “prove a common ancestor.” Why? Because God could have “used successful design principles over and over again.”

Lastly Luskin considers human psychology and our cognitive abilities and says this distinguishes us from apes. We have abilities, he says, which go far beyond the requirements of natural selection.

Richard Dawkins, for instance, says humans are “survival machines.” However, humans use complex language, tools, fire, clothing, abstract reasoning, mathematics, music, poetry, religion, and high moral reasoning. So it’s grossly ignorant to refer to humans as “survival machines.”

Luskin did a wonderful job refuting evolution. He pointed to the deep flaws in its worldview while showing a clear alternative, namely an intelligent designer and creator.

God is the designer, and his creation is clearly revealed in the book of Genesis and throughout the Bible.